The Book of Shadows (44 page)

I wondered when I should summon the elementals, when I should burn the white candles in their presence. How would I answer the questions they'd ask? Or did they already know what it was I was up to? After all, weren't they
always
watching and…ah, then it dawned on me: it seemed they were never far away, and so perhaps they were sufficiently
present
to render the blessed candles blue. I was right: lighting the candles that very night, with everything else I'd need ranged about me in the berlin, I watched as first the flame and then the wax itself turned a powdery blue. Finally, I was ready.

Moonlight fell on the slow-going berlin. By my calculations, we were far from any place of distinction. I locked the doors of the cab. I drew the blinds lest the breeze disturb the burning candles, but they held to their ever-deepening blue. Indeed, they'd soon burned from sky- to sea-blue. I secured them, settled them into niches carved into the wall of the berlin.

I took up the simple potion I'd mixed earlier, which contained the Greek bean as well as other improvised ingredients that seemed, somehow, appropriate: chiefly, duck eggs, a peeled and seeded tomato (N.B.: this
will
sting when applied to the eyes, but it is necessary; “brook no substitute,” wrote Sebastiana in one entry), and mandrake, which I'd carefully harvested from a dry streambed, according to the Book's careful directions. I worried that I hadn't mixed in enough of that two-legged root, or that I'd not powdered it properly, or had erred in the harvesting of it. As I knew that mandrake was possessed of considerable properties, it was with some trepidation that I spread the reddish paste over my eyelids.

I was uncertain, too, as to what spell to cast, what words to use. The Book, in various entries, is inconclusive as regards the efficacy of
spoken
spells—as opposed to those that the witch recites silently or sings. I'd determined to use the spell favored by the witches of Thessaly, the one which, according to Albertus Magnus, they read aloud while inscribing it on their magic mirrors. Why this spell? Perhaps it was because those witches had finished their mirrors by burying them at a crossroads, letting the trapped souls of suicides work upon them for three days. Perhaps because that was the first spell that came to mind?…For whatever reason I decided I'd recite a variation of the Thessalian spell: “S. Solam S. Tattler S. Echogordner Gematur,” which means I know not what.

All was in readiness. The candles burned on. The paste sat waiting in my mortar and pestle (of white and unveined marble, as dictated by the pharmacopoeia). I'd decided on my spell. Coincidentally, it was the midnight hour.

The deed done, I sat back against the banquette. The berlin bumped on. I heard the clapping of the team's hooves on the hard-dirt road, and the occasional cry of the raven. In my mind's eye I watched the turning of the berlin's wheels; this steadied my nerves. My heart drummed: I
had
used too much mandrake, I was certain of it, and now…No. “Steady. Steady,” I said aloud. The potion, thinned by my perspiration, seeped into the corners of my eyes and stung. I
willed
my eyes to show
l'oeil de crapaud
: immediately the stinging ceased. Perhaps that was the first time I truly understood the power of the will, so often alluded to by witch and elemental alike.

How long did I sit like this, perfectly
attendant,
my eyes caked with that red paste? (I imagine I looked like some third-rate actress of the Orient!) Not long, I think; no, it was not long before…

Suddenly, my eyes shut; from out of a murkiness that lightened first to fog, then mist, there
appeared
before me a familiar landscape. Its shapes, its colors, its features came into sharp relief. I'd never seen this particular landscape in life, yet it was familiar: it was a strip of coast like that bordering Ravndal. Sunlight lit the whole, and soon I could distinguish sedge and broom, and fishing boats left askew on sands laid bare by the departed tide.

Though I feared what might happen—would I lose the vision, somehow damage my eyesight?—I opened my eyes. Opened them wide. Then I raised the shade and looked out the window of the berlin. Night. Deepest night. We were riverside once again. I gazed out over the moonlit water. I could discern some stony ruin on the opposite shore. Noise too: the sounds of the unknown river, quite loud, for it had turned cataractal just there at some dropping down in its course. I heard too the hollow turning of the wooden wheels on the road, the creak and groan of the berlin, the thundering of those pairs of hooves, pulling, pulling…all of it so loud!

Ah, but then the sudden and abject silence as I closed my eyes again, as the sun rose up and there spread before me not a moonlit river but a sun-drenched strand. Time passed; it might have been seconds, or minutes; it might have been days, decades…. But I was conscious not of passing time but of
seeing,
of looking out over this landscape of my affected mind at the perfectly still grasses on the dunes, the cloudless sky, the abandoned sands drying under the strong sun….

My eyes opened. Again, I saw the dark, rushing river. And the moon, which soothed me not at all. Still, my heart beat wildly. Surely I
had
mixed too much of the mandrake into the potion. I would achieve what Asmodei had failed at:
I would poison myself
. Surely my heart would rattle to a dead stop and…I dared not close my eyes again.

But I did just that.

I tried, by some exertion of the will, to see
myself
in the dream. But I could not. I raised up an arm, raised my hands up in front of my face. No doubt I would have appeared somnambulant to anyone seeing me then, in the cab, waving my hands, flailing my arms blindly about…But I had no hands, no arms…What I had in the dream were…were wings. The pinnate, ebon wings of the hovering familiar: the raven.

I opened my eyes. Again: the night, the moon on the river, the sounds of the berlin….

I closed them. Again: the bright light of day, and a seascape I'd never seen but knew to be real, very real, above which I now rose, riding the currents of warm and salted air. Higher. Higher still, till, banking low and rising fast on a sudden rush of wind, I saw below me the dark mass of Ravndal. I sought to land. I could not. The choice was not mine. And, as if in defiance of my will, my host rose horribly fast and flew on. On and on, along the strand, and in no time—it was here I thought my human heart would slip from its casing, crack like crystal—we achieved C——, dreaded C——. I understood: at Ravndal I'd been very near C——; though the two places seemed worlds apart, they were not.
They were not
. This was a lesson I will remember.

…The down-falling, the deep flutter of wings, the reaching of talons to take this branch, no,
this
branch…and yes, a perch, high above the shrubs where I'd hidden days earlier. Why was I here? I'd not consciously asked to see, to be shown C——.
Au contraire,
it was my wish to never see the place again. Ah, but see it I did from my fixed vantage point: I saw it empty, the girls gone. I saw the black scratch left by flames on the sill of Mother Marie's rooms, where Peronette had danced. I saw the place in ruin…. It was then I felt the pull of the earth, felt the raven tip and slip from the branch, from the piney green of the tree, and take to the air. And it was then, spiraling higher—and I could
see
lesser birds scattering, could
smell
the fear of rodents far below—it was then I was graced with what I'd sought: a dream of my future.

But all I saw with the raven's eyes…I could not read it. Could discern no sense. Images, images only: water, rising water, dangerous water; and the shifting and various blues of shallow seas. I saw an old man covered in blood. I saw ships and a gabled white home with windows of beveled glass, and trees with narrow trunks the tops of which swayed like fishtails in a gentle sea of wind, and men, countless nameless men, and one woman's face, again and again….

The great bird spun and dipped. My heart remained high, and still: a stone on a cliff that will fall,
did
fall. Down and down and down, toward the uprushing ground. A field. Grass sere from the summer sun. A leveling—the stillness of spread wings. And then…attack, and the knifing of fur from bone, the snapping of bone, the crack and spill of…

I broke from the dream. Such sweet release!

But there I was, sprawled on the floor of the cabin, face to its carpeted floor. On my raven's tongue I knew the taste of blood and brain.

Sightless, I scrambled up onto the banquette. I felt for the square of cloth that I'd set at my side. Wet with a mixture of egg yolk and rum (as written), I used it to wipe my eyes clean.

When finally I opened my eyes it was to see the moon cast a silvered net over the black and rushing river.

It was over. The cloth had come away clean, no trace of the paste. My shut eyes showed nothing now but darkness, utter and perfect darkness. Still, I had not returned, not truly; for I realized that, though I could see, could smell and hear and…
Enfin,
though my senses had returned, certain functions of…of the living had not resumed: I was not breathing, my heart did not beat. My body was but an empty barrel.

It was a deathly stillness. It was, perhaps, a deathly state.

And it ended only when my mouth opened suddenly and I gasped,
gasped
for air as one does when rising from a watery depth. Slowly, my breathing steadied; and I relaxed into that familiar rhythm, the rise and fall of my chest. As for my heart, I heard it: coming, coming like a stranger's footfall from out of the distant dark.

A
S WE AMBLED
along the quay into Nantes that next morning, I was for the first time city-struck. Never had I seen such hubbub! The river was busy with commerce despite the very early hour, with tall masts scratching at the sky and barges plodding along among their sleeker sisters. The gray facades of the quay-side buildings overshone it all. There rose up banks and banks of colorless homes, their arched windows and iron-work balconies forming the eyes and mouths of hard-set faces, overhung with heavy, slated brows.

It was not long before all eyes fell upon the berlin; the braver boys and men on the quay dared to jump up onto the running board and peer inside. I was
terrified
! Some asked for money; others offered services at a price, love among them. There was a young boy, no older than six or seven, who thrust his thumbless hands through the window, grimy palms open and empty. Running behind him was a man who said, simperingly, “My boy…how, Monsieur, will he fend for himself in such a state?
Please,
Monsieur?” And I gave in, generously, though I knew,
knew
the boy's “state” was not a natural one: with a hatchet his father had defined his son. I might well have struck at the man; for fresh in my mind was the willed effect Sebastiana had had, long ago, on her extorting husband. As it was, I knew to look away from him fast, for I felt a change…a
heated
change coming over me, and I dread to think what I might have done. I nearly retched as those tiny, filthy fingers folded around whatever bills I proffered; and then the boy fell back from the board and disappeared. With trembling hands I latched the doors and drew the shades. Fiercely, I rapped at the roof: Michel understood, and drove from that drear and dirty place as fast as the narrow streets allowed.

One look later at the guidebook I'd procured, penned by one Monsieur Joanne, and my impressions of the place were confirmed. For it was near Nantes, late in the Revolution, that the bestial Carrier and his
noyades
, his crews of “drowners,” had set their enemies afloat on the Loire—coupled by iron cuffs, clinging to their weighted rafts—only to send them to its depths beneath a sky alight with fireworks. And it was that city's castle that had housed the Maréchal de Retz, executed in the fifteenth century for his complicity in the deaths of several hundred children by means of indescribable rites and rituals. Yes, the place bespoke just such a history. I wondered, would every city be the same? I would have Michel avoid such places, as possible, for surely they could only degenerate further as we made our way from river to sea.

Well beyond Nantes, the sounds of the city receded, I sat back in the berlin. I determined to sleep, without success—still my heart raced. For distraction, I turned again to Sebastiana's Book and by day's end I'd discover another aspect of the Craft I was
most
eager to practice, despite the fearfully divined dream of the night before.

And so, as finally we neared Angers late in the day, rolling west on a wide road that mimicked the wider river, I took up the brass bell that sat idly at my side, and, for the first time, I summoned the elementals.

I looked out over the Loire with tired eyes, saw it shimmering brown, almost gold beneath the low-angled sunshine. The bell's song sailed over the insistent rush of the river. There stood, beside the road, a bank of yellow-flowering trees; in the shade of these several old men angled away the twilit hours. I wondered, would I be able to see the elementals take shape, coalesce of air and water? Would the old fishermen see them too and, destined to be disbelieved all the remaining years of their lives, hurry home to tell of the fantastic fish they'd seen rise from the river?

I rang the bell again, holding it outside the berlin. I was tired, and perhaps I too rudely told my boy that it was
not
his attention I sought, and that he should simply continue on toward Angers without…It was then that I, as if involuntarily, drew my head back too fast—a bump above my right ear, large as an egg, attested to
that
graceless act for days—and…And as I dropped the brass bell onto the carpeted floor, I…I won't say I
screamed
. Let me say that I greeted the sudden appearance of the elementals, there, on the banquette, with…with an
audible
exhalation.

There they sat, shoulder to shoulder, full-form, staring at me.

“Witch,” said the priest, “every time we appear you nearly leap from your skin. Even now that you've seen fit, for whatever reason, to
summon
us.” Father Louis looked down at the brass bell as it rolled away beneath the banquette; though I wanted to attribute the bell's sudden motion to a bend in the road, I knew better.

What do you want?
asked Madeleine. Her words were a challenge I would meet.

“How long have you bled, like that?” I asked. Madeleine stared at me and her form grew suddenly…
fuller,
dense as a cloud laden with rain.

Since the day I clawed my throat open. Two hundred years ago, by your calendar; an eternity by mine.

Father Louis turned toward the window and the river beyond. “Why ask such a question?” he muttered; clearly, he expected no satisfaction.

Yes, why?
echoed the succubus.

“Because,” I said, “I have an idea.”

Neither spoke then. Rather, the elementals looked at Sebastiana's Book, which lay open in my lap; then, expressionless, they looked at each other.

“Come to me at midnight,” I commanded; and I said again, “I have an idea.”

We would pass the night in Angers; and there, I would put my idea into practice: I would work the Craft. All the long sleepless night before, having endured the dream, I thought, and concluded thusly: I had to practice the Craft again, and soon. If I did not…Well, it was a potent admixture of fear and intrigue, daring and denial, that drove me. Hadn't I brought myself near,
too
near death? Perhaps I had. And for what? To see through a bird's eyes unintelligible images of my future?…Ah, but it had all been achieved in the service of the Craft. The service of the Craft: it was
that
drew me on. But next time,
this
time I'd apply it more practically. And not to myself, but to another. Madeleine.

Having called for the elementals, having told them that I had an idea (which I did not then disclose), I said I wished to stop, indeed had already ordered the driver to stop. Father Louis concurred: he cared not what we did, as long as we arrived at the crossroads beneath the next new moon, rising five nights hence.
Yes,
stressed the succubus in parting,
we will need the new moon. Keep an eye on your calendar.

So Michel turned from the banks of the Loire toward Angers, sitting inland on the Maine, an affluent of the greater river; and I took a room at an inn shadowed by that city's ancient fortress, a château built in the interests of safety, not splendor. Angers was charming, if somewhat
dark
in aspect. I wondered if I was already growing accustomed to massed humanity, cityscapes, and strangers.

Within the hour, I found myself being led up a dark and narrow staircase, its steps made of that slate, quarried locally, which earns for the city the appellation “Black Angers.” Indeed, the steps seemed hewn from obsidian; they were dark and smooth as the river's night-waters. At each narrow step I expected to slip backward down the whole lightless flight of stairs, for I was off-balance: I had in my hands the makings of a simple meal, a torch, the brass bell, Sebastiana's purse, and our two Books.

When finally we'd climbed to a landing, the innkeeper handed me a heavy key and she, stout but unfazed by the steep climb, thanked me and asked did “Monsieur” have all he needed. “Indeed, he does,” said I. “Rather,
I
do,” I sloppily amended. She looked at me quizzically; then, accustomed to men far more foreign than I, she accepted my thanks and took her leave.

The room was tucked up under the eaves of one of those dark, cross-timbered homes, ages-old, which crowd the narrow streets of Angers, seeming to lean forward, shading the streets at midday with their heavy brows. There was a single window cut into the angled ceiling of the room; this gave on to the Maine, far below, whose waters had once filled the neighboring castle's deep moats. Leaning out that window and looking to my left, I could see one of the fortress's famed towers, a fearsome affair of dark stone and slate, unadorned but for a band of bright stone girdling its middle. “This will do,” I said aloud. “This will do nicely.”

It had come to me as I read Sebastiana's Book the previous night, once I'd recovered and my systems had settled; specifically, an entry dated not long after the Greek Supper, in which she writes of a sister she'd heard of who'd tried, in numberless ways, to avoid the witches' fate: the coming of the Blood. (She notes too that this sister fell to the Blood, appropriately enough, in a Finnish town; the year was 1802.) Sebastiana recorded but one attempt made by this unnamed sister. In the course of three quite sketchy sentences, Sebastiana writes that the witch failed, of course; but she did once succeed in stanching the flow of blood from a sheep's severed legs. The spell which worked on that unfortunate sheep—butchered while alive—involved the naming of “the four rivers that flow from Paradise,” as listed in the Book of Moses, bracketed by what seemed to me a fairly standard spell.

Why not? I thought. Madeleine is no barnyard animal, but still…

That night, alone in that quiet and suitably clean little room, believing the elementals would not come till rung for some hours later, I lay down on what passed for a bed. I had requested a Bible from the innkeeper, and this she happily had delivered to me, posthaste. I had it and Sebastiana's Book beside me. Tired as I was, I doubted I could sleep: I was excited, eager to work the Craft, and my mind was busy as a mouse in a maze. I would read…. But as I lay on that thin palette, the rich river air filled the room, wafting in through the window I'd opened. I felt the temperature fall with the sun. I drew an old, tattered blanket up over my full belly—I'd already eaten the bit of black bread, cheese, and salt pork I'd brought—and I kicked off the new boots I'd gotten in Rennes. The welcome silence of her house stirred in me an unaccountable rush of affection for the innkeeper, who'd not distinguished herself in any other way, save for having called me “Monsieur.” Yes, silence then; silence save for the river sounds. And this after hour upon hour of the berlin's wheels grinding over endless roadways. So there I lay, exhausted, excited, and sated, ready to read the Word of the Lord…but I'd not even lifted the book before sleep overtook me.

I woke with a start some time later, my left hand at rest on the Bible. My right hand shot like a dart to my side: yes, it was there: Sebastiana's Book.

A hand on each book, I surrendered again to sleep.

I woke later that night not knowing what time it was. More pointedly: how many hours remained till midnight?

I pulled on my boots and scrambled down the dark stairs, through the inn's common rooms, empty but thick with smoke and the scent of stewing meat, and out onto the narrow street. I'd gathered up both books off the bed, Sebastiana's and…well, God's. I stood in the dark street, a book tucked under each arm. A chill rose up off the cobblestones, and the air bore the scents of the river and the smoke rising from the city's innumerable chimneys. Looking up at the darkly timbered houses, which seemed to lean into the streets to stare down at me, I wondered which way to walk. I had maps and books that purported to inform, to guide, but I'd left them all in the berlin. I knew nothing of Angers. Finally, I walked off, down the sloping street, away from the inn and the fortified château that dominated all.

It was not long before I came upon a clock that said I'd two hours till midnight; a second clock—hung in the window of a charcuterie, amid pallid pig heads and crusted logs of pâté—confirmed the hour. Only then did I decide to seek out a café; and I must say I reveled,
reveled
in the freedom I now had to do so. (Had I
ever
gone here or there, this way or that, of my own volition, not driven by the clock of the convent, or even the wishes of my saviors?)

I found a café with the improbable name of La Grosse Poule down along the river. Of its few, well-salted patrons, certainly I was the only one settled in a dark corner with a beer and a Bible. I read by the light of a single white candle, which was greasy and burned too quickly down. I felt the heat not of that thin candle but of the Angevins' stares; thankfully, they soon resigned themselves to the stranger among them.

It was in the second chapter of the first Book of Moses that I read of the Rivers of Paradise: Pison, Gihon, Hiddekel, and Frath. I confess it: I consulted too a few more familiar passages, which had comforted me in times past. I'd not yet downed half my beer.

So, I had my spell with hours to spare. I might have sat quite contentedly in that café, had my mind not then taken a dark turn, directed by some Old Testament tale. I fell to the contemplation of yet
another
thing I'd not considered since leaving Ravndal: the Blood. At Ravndal I'd learned how I would die. I learned that the blood of every witch betrays, bubbles over like an untended kettle. And the accounts I'd read of the coming of the Blood in Sebastiana's Book were horrific: witches overtaken with little warning by the rush of red, pouring forth from every orifice. Most witches, it was written, see the Blood coming, literally. It's as though they are looking out a window up which a blood tide rises, and their worlds go red from bottom to top. Their very eyes turn crimson! First, blood seeps from the pores, a pinkish-red perspiration. Purer blood drips down from the nostrils and trails down the neck from each ear. Upwelling blood swells the soft flesh under the nails till finally they slip from the fingers and toes. Blood gushes from the nether mouths. And finally, violently, the Blood spews from the mouth. Every orifice then is an outlet for the Blood, and the witch dies her red death. For every witch the end is the same.